Bilingual Activities Ideas

March 20, 2008

I received an interesting email and, when I was answering to it, I realized that many more people might need the same kind of orientation, so I decided to post it.I stumbled across your site on alltop.com and I was wondering if you could provide me with any direction (reference, another website, your own personal advise etc.) on how to immerse my daughter in the Spanish language. I am not Hispanic; I do okay with the language but not fluent by far; am currently working on it (me getting better with the language; my daughter is 18 months old; I read her Spanish books, play Spanish videos and music for her. I would love to put her in an environment where the people who care for, or rather, educate her are Hispanic but have been coming up with no options. I live in Richmond Virginia (but am from NYC). My mother watches her during the day for me and I like that. I am looking into some preschool type environments for her and would love to find something that puts a high importance on foreign language.
Anyway, I feel like I'm rambling so...again, do you have any direction for me?

In California, where I live, there are plenty of options for bilingual preschools, and I believe if you have something like this in your city, you should take a look at it. Another alternative would be starting your own school, maybe a cooperative nursery school with some other interested parents and hiring a bilingual teacher.

Here are three basic steps in raising a child bilingual:

- At least one hour a day, 5 days a week, of exposure of the child to the language. You may like having the grandma watching her, and that is great that you have it, but you may think of a fluent Spanish speaking nanny that could stay at least one hour interacting with her (even under grandma's watch - that could actually mean a well deserved break for grandma during the day!) If the city where you live is not so diverse as California (where Spanish is the second language spoken) you might want to try to find foreign students willing to take on such job (you can even offer them English instruction in exchange, or as a perk - I did that once and it worked great).

- It is best if one language comes always from the same person. If the mom is the one in charge of Spanish, let daddy be the one that brings home the French. Or German. Or Japanese. Kids love to have a secret, special language shared with this one special person. Like a sort of secret code.

- Use the language in your daily activities, attaching meaningful actions and interactions to words and sentences. Books, music and video are great resources, but the best way a child learns a language (even their mother tongue) is by interaction. At the table, during meals, potty time, at the playground... Using always the same sentences, you can help your child connect the words to the facts, while experiencing the language in its alive form. Spread the hour a day throughout the day. "Buenos dias. Quieres cereales para el desayuno?" "Abra la puerta mi amor, para salirmos" "Vamos a poner la arena al balde?" (and pardon my Spanish, cos I myself am no fluent...). Repeat the same sentences, with the same intention in the daily routine, and introduce new things every once in a while, remembering to apply the new things in more sentences until they become familiar. Repetition and surprise, familiarity and novelty.

January 16, 2008

Bébé Lilly is one of my son's favorite web videos. When he saw this new one, he exclaimed: "Oh, this is in French". ForeignMama never got so proud! He is getting into recognizing languages - not only the Portuguese that I hammer in his head everyday, but pointing to things like: "oh, this is Spanish", "this song is in Arabic" and now, he noticed French, although we don't practice the "frogs' dialect" with him and we rarely mention that something is being said in French. That comes to prove that an early bilingual education opens mind roads to not only one extra foreign language, but several, allowing awareness of the "otherness" in communication early on!Have fun with Bébé Lilly:

August 09, 2007

Lots of universities and educational institutions promote Foreign Language Immersion Summer Camps. While it might not be as intense as spending a month sipping espressos in Italy or eating croissants at Parisians cafes, it is quite close, and a lot more affordable and easy to arrange. Following is a list with some ideas (I am not endorsing any of them, I just made a pedestrian search on Google and came up with those):

July 24, 2007

Learning is all about motivation, and if there is something motivating
children worldwide nowadays is the little wizard's seven tome saga. Now that "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" is out and about, bilingual families worldwide have a great tool available. If
you are trying to teach another language to your children, Harry Potter
has been translated to over 67 different languages - check out more
details at the Wikipedia entry, and find out how to buy translated
books here -, providing you with tools and resources to make their
vocabulary and fluency improve, as if by magic. My cousin's girls, back
in Brazil, go to a French School, and as we sent them the huge books,
all in Voltaire's dialect, they devoured it as fast as they said "Merci
beaucoup!"

A quick list of three games and tricks to help teaching languages with Harry Potter:

1.
If they have already finished reading it in their mother tongue, open
in a random page, ask them to scan the page quickly and tell what is
this page about. The first one that comes up with the answer gets a
lollipop.
2. Cut windows in a paper to hide certain words - verbs work best - in a long sentence, and ask them to "fill in the blanks".3.
Make a contest using the proper nouns and invented words in the books -
pick some, make a list of 5 for each kid and ask them to find the
translation. Whoever finishes his/her list first, wins the contest.

LINKS!

TODAY IS A JAMIROQUAI DAY - ALRIGHT?Nostalgic mood, remembering how much fun I used to have. Listening to Space Cowboy, Virtual Insanity and Cosmic Girl in YouTube. I've never thought I was going to be one of those people that go like "good times were the old times". But I haven't been in a party like that for a while...

TRUEMORS, YOUR COCKTAIL PARTY CONVERSATION FUELIf you need great conversation starters for social gatherings and stuff, check out Truemors.com daily. Soon you'll be generating heated debates starting like "have you heard that bat bandwidth is species specific?", or "did you hear that a cigar smoked by Elvis Presley sold for $550 at the Elvis Expo Tradeshow in Memphis?".

NOW LISTENING:Pandora, the radio from the Music Genome Project, is an automated music recommendation FREE service and highly addictive. Users enter a song or artist that they enjoy, and the service responds by playing selections that are musically similar. Users give feedback on each song choice — approving or disapproving — which Pandora takes in consideration when making future selections.